SharePoint Weekly

It’s Monday morning, 10 January 2011… do you know what your group policy objects are configured to that may potentially affect the end user experience between SharePoint 2010 and your Office 2010 client users? If not, no need to sweat, Microsoft recently published a document on Group Policy for Microsoft Office 2010 (7 January 2011). It’s fairly well written, weighing in at a whopping 1.9 MB (303 pages) for the DOC file (where’s my light and low Cal docx edition???).

The document finely articulates the different capabilities of the Office system, describing the policy object settings and what their effects on the Office client family and SharePoint products and technologies are. Included in this document is information that pertains to the SharePoint Workspace product as well as the administrative templates that are associated with the product.

For instance, with regard to the Contact Card, there is an option to “Configure presence icon” with three options – Display All, Display some, Display None (page 161). While this might seem trivial, it’s definitely something to keep in mind when you’re working in an environment where you want to show presence and you have populated your SIP address or made it available to the User Profile Service for consumption.

So while knowing how the group policy objects within your Active Directory based domain are important, there are definitely individuals new to the SharePoint career that have been tasked with implementing SharePoint Foundation Server 2010 to begin assisting with a proof of concept, pilot or perhaps a full on collaboration system that has requirements that can’t justify the procurement of SharePoint Server 2010’s Standard or Enterprise licensing. Or perhaps you’re not a SharePoint Administrator / IT Pro at all and you’re looking for some additional documentation to help with planning and pushing forward with developing an implementation guide, then you’ll definitely want to pick up Microsoft’s updated “Getting Started with Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010” document (Originally Published November 2010, updated 7 January 2011).

The document provides great detail to assist in the planning phase of an SPF 2010 implementation and points out the key differences and features that have been removed from the Windows SharePoint Services version 3 platform.